Various chemical compounds of interest, such as biofuels, can be produced via metabolically enhanced cyanobacteria. One of these compounds is ethanol. In this context, the PCT patent application WO 2009/098089 A2 discloses the use of ethanologenic genes, for example pyruvate decarboxylase and alcohol dehydrogenase genes for the production of ethanol with cyanobacteria.
Despite a generally promising concept, the practical implementation of ethanol production with metabolically enhanced cyanobacteria still faces critical problems which have made it so far difficult to achieve economical production rates per production volume and area.
Therefore, there is a need for improved cyanobacterial cells which reduce or resolve at least some of these problems.